Systems and methods herein generally relate to printers that use replaceable printing modules and more particularly to optimal color rendition using spot colors during printing.
In order to print using colors other than the printer's permanent colors that are used for all print jobs, or the vast majority of print jobs (e.g., colors other than red, green, blue (RGB) in a RGB printer; other than cyan, yellow, magenta, black (CMYK); etc.), in a CMYK printer, such as orange, green, blue, etc., some printers include an additional housing (sometimes referred to as the 5th color housing, or Xth housing if more than 5 are enabled) that holds replaceable printing modules (sometimes referred to as a customer replaceable unit (CCU), 5th color module, spot color module, or imaging media cartridges) that are separate from the permanent color printing modules. This allows switching of the replaceable printing modules seamlessly in minutes; however, the fifth colorants (spot colors) are more expensive than the printer's permanent colors.
When job programming an extended gamut job, two destination profiles are applied to the job. One is for printing to the extended gamut (e.g., CMYK+Orange), and the other is for printing to the base gamut (CMYK). Also, many printers have a pre-flight capability which can identify spot calls within a printer description language (PDL) file targeted for raster image processing (RIPing). On these extended gamut print engines, the capability to auto-program a job to enable optimal image quality (IQ) on spot colors based in the PDL is highly useful.